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The FCC plan to undo its net neutrality rules

washingtonpost.com

171–180 of 206 posts

Re: The FCC plan to undo its net neutrality rules

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eliminating net neutrality incentivizes ISPs to build auxiliary services that they can artificially support by throttling the bandwidth of competing products. It incentivizes them to seek profit by favoring some net traffic over other net traffic. It does not in any way incentivize them to build larger or better networks. It does not incentivize them to invest in their infrastructure. All it does is let them make mor…

Business Model 1: Build your own services and throttle everyone else's services unless they pay a premium (in which case your own services would be cheaper, but the profit they get from their own services must be higher than the profit they get from NOT selling the bandwidth their premium service uses, to third parties). Let's put it this way, if a hotel builds a Jacuzzi, you're argument is that the hotel owner will…

Well timed - heres an article which has a list of various crap these firms have pulled

http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/26/15439622/fcc-net-neutralit...

Re: The FCC plan to undo its net neutrality rules

#172
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not. Not to get too political but there are two groups: "the people" and "business". Watch every decision the current administration makes. It's helpful for "business" and hurts "the people". This is the opposite of what most people think it should be.

> Watch every decision the current administration makes. Just the current administration, or democracies around the world? It's a fact that capital rules economy and by extension our lives. Why do you think it would be any different under Obama, Hillary, Lincoln, Thatcher, Blair, Castro, Kim Jong Un or Abe? The kind of democracy we have is bourgeois democracy - in place to protect the intersts of those owners of priv…

Narrowing your focus to the particular issue at stake in this thread, there's an obvious and clear difference between how the Democrat-controlled FCC behaved and how the Republican-controlled FCC is behaving. Both parties are not the same.

Re: The FCC plan to undo its net neutrality rules

#173

> Pai argued that rolling back the rules will encourage ISPs to spend more on their broadband networks How? How on earth does letting ISPs milk more money out of their existing network incentivize those ISPs to expand that network? It's just so frustrating that these guys no longer even bother to pretend that their arguments make any logical sense at all. "We'll protect user privacy by eliminating these rules that pr…

Provided that there is competition, it's actually a good idea. My knee-jerk response to this was "you can do this, but you have to take away their monopolies." In a heavily competitive environment, ISPs wouldn't be able to get away with BS because everyone would just switch.

I don't think that would necessarily be the case. If ISP's could extract a bunch of extra profit by throttling there's a decent chance that all of them would do it.

Look at mobile providers for an example. Text messages cost almost nothing yet for many years each company charged heftily for text messaging which earned them a mountain of profit. And that's in a segment where there were multiple big players competing on relatively even terms.

Re: The FCC plan to undo its net neutrality rules

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have Verizon(fiber), Comcast(coax) and AT&T(copper) where I live. Not to mention satellite and 4G internet options.

Congratulations! You're an outlier.

Then use a VPN? Or is the idea they will charge high rates for all traffic (already legal by the way) thus preventing access to the majority of the internet?

Re: The FCC plan to undo its net neutrality rules

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN isn't generally liberal leaning. HN is generally libertarian leaning. Not all of us, of course, but the sentiment here is very pro-business.

I'd gamble the liberals have the plurarilty, but just with a much higher representation of libertarians than broader society.

I can agree to that.

Re: The FCC plan to undo its net neutrality rules

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations! You're an outlier.

Then use a VPN? Or is the idea they will charge high rates for all traffic (already legal by the way) thus preventing access to the majority of the internet?

VPNs hide the destination of your traffic, they effectively cannot hide from your ISP that you're connecting to said VPN. ISPs would likely throttle most VPN in this instance, because what would stop them?

Re: The FCC plan to undo its net neutrality rules

#177

Wouldn't it be fun if Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and a few other streamers all decided to throttle the Washington DC area down to, say, 10% of normal outbound bandwidth for a long weekend? Maybe it wouldn't touch Pai, but if it pissed off a huge block of his neighbors maybe he'd start to understand the idea.

Hah! The federal government doesn't care whatsoever about DC residents. We don't even have a Senator to complain to. What exactly do you expect his pissed off neighbors to do?

Re: The FCC plan to undo its net neutrality rules

#178
post #49

"“Two years ago, I warned that we were making a serious mistake,” Pai said. “It’s basic economics: The more heavily you regulate something, the less of it you’re likely to get.” Just reading this makes me angry. Has he ever heard of monopolies / oligopolies, or simply the place of government in regulating public utilities. Apply his quote to water supplies and see what happens.

The "regulate it like water" argument is less persuasive since we found out that many of our water utilities are making our children retarded because of lead poisoning.

Re: The FCC plan to undo its net neutrality rules

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then use a VPN? Or is the idea they will charge high rates for all traffic (already legal by the way) thus preventing access to the majority of the internet?

VPNs hide the destination of your traffic, they effectively cannot hide from your ISP that you're connecting to said VPN. ISPs would likely throttle most VPN in this instance, because what would stop them?

Something like obfsproxy[0] or a straight up http proxy wrapped in SSL and a VPN service that acquires and rotates new IP addresses regularly would prevent this. It would be an expensive game of wack a mole for the ISPs at least, personally I'd just set up a digital ocean droplet for my traffic. Less technical users can employ Streisand[1].

[0]https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/TrafficObfuscatio... [1]https://github.com/jlund/streisand

Re: The FCC plan to undo its net neutrality rules

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the evidence is implicit in the fact that the opposite of those things happened when net neutrality was put in place

That's anything but a fact. Investment increased overall.[1] The FCC classified ISPs as "telecommunications services", same as now, until the mid-2000s. That's the framework that worked well for decades. The one Pai wants is the one that killed competition. The FCC issued network neutrality regulations in 2010 because ISPs had started to violate the guidelines the FCC unanimously approved in 2005. They only invoked T…

The FCC regulated dsl as a telecommunications service until 2004. But dial up and cable internet were not.

That's part of the reason why cable internet is so dominant. Dsl companies were required to let competition use their last mile. So nobody wanted to invest.

It was only after telecoms got the gIt assurances that the FCC wouldn't unbundle fiber that Verizon and att started expanding.

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